Runaway inequality is now America's most critical economic fact of life. In 1970, the ratio of pay between the top 100 CEOs and the average worker was 45 to 1. In the current decade it is a shocking 800 to 1! During the time in between a new economic philosophy set in that cut taxes, deregulated finance, and trimmed social spending. Those policies set in motion a process that greatly expanded the power of financial interests to accelerate inequality. But how exactly does that happen? Using over 120 easy-to-understand charts and graphs, Runaway Inequality explains the process by which corporation after corporation falls victim to systematic wealth extraction by banks, private equity firms, and hedge funds. It reveals how financial strip-mining puts enormous downward pressure on jobs, wages, benefits, and working conditions, while boosting the incomes of financial elites. But Runaway Inequality does more than make sense of our economic plight. It also shows why virtually all the key issues that we face―from climate change to the exploding prison population―are intimately connected to rising economic inequality. Most importantly, Runaway Inequality calls upon us to build a common movement to tackle the sources of increasing income and wealth inequality. As the author makes clear, the problem will not cure itself. It will take enormous energy and dedication to bring economic justice and fairness back to American society. The book is divided into four parts: Part I: What is the fundamental cause of runaway economic inequality? What has made our economy less fair and left most of us less secure? Part II: How does the United States really compare with other major developed countries? How do we stack up on quality of life, health, and well-being? Part III: What does economic inequality have to do with so many of the critical issues we face, including taxes, debt, education, criminal justice, racism, climate change, foreign trade, and war? Part IV: What concrete steps can we take to begin building a fair and just society? This revised and updated third edition includes a new preface by the author, additional information on how climate change affects and is affected by inequality, a new section on the Trump tax bill and how it will impact inequality, and over 75 charts and graphs that have been revised and updated.
Category: Business & Economics

Runaway inequality is now America’s most critical economic fact of life. In 1970, the ratio of pay between the top 100 CEOs and the average worker was 45 to 1. Today it is a shocking 829 to one! During that time a new economic philosophy set in that cut taxes, deregulated finance, and trimmed social spending. Those policies set in motion a process that greatly expanded the power of financial interests to accelerate inequality. But how exactly does that happen? Using easy-to-understand charts and graphs, Runaway Inequality explains the process by which corporation after corporation falls victim to systematic wealth extraction by banks, private equity firms, and hedge funds. It reveals how financial strip-mining puts enormous downward pressure on jobs, wages, benefits, and working conditions, while boosting the incomes of financial elites. But Runaway Inequality does more than make sense of our economic plight. It also shows why virtually all the key issues that we face—from climate change to the exploding prison population—are intimately connected to rising economic inequality. Most importantly, Runaway Inequality calls upon us to build a common movement to tackle the sources of increasing income and wealth inequality. As the author makes clear, the problem will not cure itself. It will take enormous energy and dedication to bring economic justice and fairness back to American society. The book is divided into four parts: Part I: What is the fundamental cause of runaway economic inequality? What has made our economy less fair and left most of us less secure? Part II: How does the United States really compare with other major developed countries? How do we stack up on quality of life, health, and well-being? Part III: What does economic inequality have to do with so many of the critical issues we face, including taxes, debt, education, criminal justice, racism, climate change, foreign trade, and war? Part IV: What concrete steps can we take to begin building a fair and just society? From the book: “There is nothing in the economic universe that will automatically rescue us from runaway inequality. There is no pendulum, no invisible political force that ‘naturally’ will swing back towards economic fairness. Either we wage a large-scale battle for economic, social, and environmental justice, or we will witness the continued deterioration of the world we inhabit. The arc of capitalism does not bend towards justice. We must bend it.”
Category: Business & Economics

Introducing readers to the wild side of fantasy finance where they can decide whether or not the million-an-hour crowd produces anything positive for society and the economy, this 12-step guide shows how to bankrupt your morality to accumulate vast riches the way hedge fund managers do.
Category: Business & Economics

How could the best and brightest (and most highly paid) in finance crash the global economy and then get us to bail them out as well? What caused this mess in the first place? Housing? Greed? Dumb politicians? What can Main Street do about it? In The Looting of America, Leopold debunks the prevailing media myths that blame low-income home buyers who got in over their heads, people who ran up too much credit-card debt, and government interference with free markets. Instead, readers will discover how Wall Street undermined itself and the rest of the economy by playing and losing at a highly lucrative and dangerous game of fantasy finance. He also asks some tough questions: Why did Americans let the gap between workers' wages and executive compensation grow so large? Why did we fail to realize that the excess money in those executives' pockets was fueling casino-style investment schemes? Why did we buy the notion that too-good-to-be-true financial products that no one could even understand would somehow form the backbone of America's new, postindustrial economy? How do we make sure we never give our wages away to gamblers again? And what can we do to get our money back? In this page-turning narrative (no background in finance required) Leopold tells the story of how we fell victim to Wall Street's exotic financial products. Readers learn how even school districts were taken in by "innovative" products like collateralized debt obligations, better known as CDOs, and how they sucked trillions of dollars from the global economy when they failed. They'll also learn what average Americans can do to ensure that fantasy finance never rules our economy again. As the country teeters on the brink of what could be the next Great Depression, we should be especially wary of the so-called financial experts who got us here, and then conveniently got themselves out. So far, it appears they've won the battle, but The Looting of America refuses to let them write the history--or plan its aftermath.
Category: Business & Economics

This collection of linked stories by internationally renowned evolutionist Lynn Margulis reveals science from the inside--its thrills, disappointments, and triumphs. A largely fictional account, it draws on her decades of experience to portray the poor judgment, exhaustion, and life-threatening dedication of real scientists--their emotional preoccupations, sexual distractions, and passions for research. The esoteric, demanding, sometimes exhilarating world of science emerges from the shadows of its passive narrative into the sunlight of the personal voice of those who attempt to wrench secrets directly from nature. All of us who struggle to balance family, professional, and social commitments with intellectual quest will be intrigued by the humanity of these tales.
Category: Fiction

This short book lays out a new definition for what constitutes a social problem: the violation of a group’s human rights, which are understood as commonly upheld standards about what people deserve and should be protected from in life. Evaluating U.S. society from an international human rights perspective, Bonds also stresses that human rights are necessarily political and can therefore never be part of a purely objective exercise to assess wellbeing in a particular society. His approach recognizes that there is no one single interpretation of what rights mean, and that different groups with differing interests are going to promote divergent views, some better than others. This book is ideal for undergraduate sociology courses on social problems, as well as courses on social justice and human rights.
Category: Social Science

A CIA-connected labor union, an assassination attempt, a mysterious car crash, listening devices, and stolen documents--everything you'd expect from the latest thriller. Yet, this was the reality of Tony Mazzocchi, the Rachel Carson of the U.S. workplace; a dynamic labor leader whose legacy lives on in today's workplaces and ongoing alliances between labor activists and environmentalists, and those who believe in the promise of America. In The Man Who Hated Work and Loved Labor: The Life and Times of Tony Mazzocchi, author and labor expert Les Leopold recounts the life of the late Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers Union leader. Mazzocchi's struggle to address the unconscionable toxic exposure of tens of thousands of workers led to the passage of the Occupational Safety and Health Act and included work alongside nuclear whistleblower Karen Silkwood. His noble, high-profile efforts forever changed working conditions in American industry--and made him enemy number one to a powerful few. As early as the 1950s, when the term "environment" was nowhere on the political radar, Mazzocchi learned about nuclear fallout and began integrating environmental concerns into his critique of capitalism and his union work. An early believer in global warming, he believed that the struggle of capital against nature was the irreconcilable contradiction that would force systemic change. Mazzocchi's story of non-stop activism parallels the rise and fall of industrial unionism. From his roots in a pro-FDR, immigrant family in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, through McCarthyism, the Sixties, and the surge of the environmental movement, Mazzocchi took on Corporate America, the labor establishment and a complacent Democratic Party. This profound biography should be required reading for those who believe in taking risks and making the world a better place. While Mazzocchi's story is so full of peril and deception that it seems almost a work of fiction, Leopold proves that the most provocative and lasting stories in life are those of real people.
Category: Biography & Autobiography

This book is a work of contemporary economic history focusing primarily on the US and the UK. It shows that, historically, much of the wealth of the ultra-wealthy has been based on inheritance, tax evasion, political influence, or wage theft. Today, much of the wealth of the rentier class—the super-rich—is based on income from ownership or control of scarce assets, or assets artificially made scarce. As a result, the super-rich reap much of their wealth from patents, monopolies, and subsidies. Their banks retain the right to speculate on risky derivatives, and their credit-card companies are not limited by usury laws that reduce interest rates. The super-rich have lowered (or escaped) inheritance taxes, shifted much of their income to lower taxed capital gains, practiced wage theft, fought minimum wage laws, outsourced jobs, and resorted to temps and contract labor to avoid unions and decent wages. They use tax havens where trillions of dollars remain untaxed, transfer profits of their intellectual and financial property to subsidiaries in low-tax regimes, and defend for-profit health insurance that is unaffordable and inequitable for millions. This book states in qualitative and quantitative terms how expensive the super-rich have become, why they are unsustainable for the rest of us, and what the way forward to greater economic equality may be. In sum, the super-rich are unaffordable.
Category: Business & Economics

Essays on the dangers of the wealth and income gap, collected by the New York Times–bestselling author of It’s Even Worse Than You Think. This collection includes writings by a wide range of voices—including Adam Smith, Elizabeth Warren, Barbara Ehrenreich, Joseph E. Stiglitz, Studs Terkel, Paul Krugman, Barack Obama, and David Cay Johnston—illuminating the reality of economic inequality in America, where in spite of the fury that followed the 2008 financial crisis, little has to been done to address the gulf between the one percent and the ninety-nine percent. Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist David Cay Johnston explains that in this most unequal of developed nations, every aspect of inequality remains hotly contested and poorly understood. These writings, from leading scholars, journalists, and activists, offers a multifaceted look at the problem, exploring its devastating—and dangerous—implications in areas as diverse as education, justice, health care, social mobility, and political representation. Provocative and eminently readable, here is an essential resource for anyone who cares about the future of America—and compelling evidence that inequality can be ignored only at the nation’s peril.
Category: Social Science

In this illuminating and provocative study, Stillman provides a new understanding of the foundation of the American state. Whether renewing a driver's license, traveling on an airplane, or just watching in fascination as a robot probes Mars, we all participate in the everyday workings of the modern administrative state. As Stillman demonstrates in this study, however, we have not, until now, fully investigated or appreciated this administrative stateÕs origins or its evolution into the entity that so affects our lives today. Stillman reveals that this modern enterprise emerged from a complex foundation of ideas and ideals rather than as a result of a simple, rational plan or cataclysmic event, as previously contended. In fact, he finds that the basis for our current administrative state lies in the lives of the seven individuals who, during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, invented its various elements. Stillman also finds that although they lived at different times, these seven founders-George William Curtis, Charles Francis Adams, Jr., Emory Upton, Jane Addams, Frederick W. Taylor, Richard Childs, and Louis Brownlow-had much in common: all were products of intensely Protestant, small-town America, and all were motivated by strong moral idealism. Indeed, Stillman finds that state making in the United States has been a continuation of the Protestant goal to "protest and purify." Some names are more recognizable than others, but all, through remarkable moral fervor and exceptional leadership skills, invented the administrative practices and procedures so familiar today.
Category: Political Science